by Alex Tinson
Before the marriage it is essential for both bride and groom to undergo a blood test. This was introduced to minimise the risk of birth abnormalities as a result of intermarriage, recognised as a hazard because of the small size of the UAE’s local population. When Katya and Khaled arrived for their test, Khaled received a cool reception from the Emirati woman in charge: ‘What?’ she admonished him. ‘No Emirati women left?’
And then there’s the marriage ceremony, normally carried out by a representative of the court who goes to the groom’s house to complete the formalities in the presence of male members of the families. But when a foreigner is involved, the bride and groom must present themselves to the court, first for the preliminary paperwork and then for the marriage. Time after time, Katya and Khaled would front up for their appointment only for the official to be unable to see them or be suddenly called away for some mysterious reason.
In the end, Katya and Khaled overcame all these barriers and finally managed to get a court official to carry out the legalities. It was an incredibly sterile setting—the absolute opposite of what you would want for two young people so clearly in love. As the father of the bride, I was one of the witnesses. Khaled’s father had unfortunately passed away and he had not yet told his mother or his wider family. His witness was a close friend of the newlyweds, a larger than life Kuwaiti businessman who gloried in the name of Lord Faleh. Lord Faleh was an extremely wealthy property developer who had shelled out a few thousand dollars to acquire the title of lord of the manor of East Beaulieu in Boreham, near Chelmsford in Essex. It didn’t entitle him to sleep with any village maiden within the manor on her wedding night, as was the ancient right of the lord of the manor, but he said the title made him feel ‘more English’. Certainly, the lord was always dressed in an immaculate western suit.
Normally a marriage is an occasion for massive celebrations. A well-off Emirati family might splash out hundreds of thousands of dollars on this, holding separate events for the men and the women, usually at a five-star hotel. These could be extraordinarily lavish affairs.
In our case, though, we had to settle for something more modest. Katya’s sister Erica was also along for the occasion, and the five of us held a celebratory dinner at the top of Dubai’s Emirates Towers. Good old Lord Faleh was kind enough to pick up the tab. Indeed, his generosity knew no bounds: he had also paid for Erica to travel first class from Australia, and he presented her with a pair of earrings that we later learned were worth tens of thousands of dollars. It seems that, though married, the lord had developed a sweet spot for young Erica.
And so it was that Katya and Khaled were married in January 2007, bringing full circle a relationship that had been running on and off for close to ten years. For my part I was happy that Katya and Khaled were husband and wife. Actually, I was proud of them. I saw the marriage of Katya and Khaled as a wonderful celebration of what is important about being human in a world where there is so much bigotry and prejudice. I savoured the moment. It showed what was possible when you open your life to new adventure and open your mind to what the world has to offer.
I wanted to give the new couple the best gift I could. At the time that was not so easy. Having only recently returned, I was still rebuilding my life out of the ashes of my foray to Australia, so my finances weren’t in the shape they had once been—and would be again soon.
In the good years I had invested in a ring for each of my girls. One featured a sapphire, the other a ruby and the third an emerald. I brought out the ring with the sapphire, which was a huge stone, and presented it to Katya as ‘something blue’. I also gave the couple a fifty per cent share in two of the young camels I had acquired before leaving the UAE courtesy of Sheikh Sultan’s trade-up offer. What else would a camel tragic do? It was also a good thing to give to a Mazrouei, given the family’s deep desert roots and history with camels. Ultimately those babies sold for a decent price, so it turned out to be not a bad gift at all.
In truth, Katya and Khaled were hardly in need of a leg-up. Khaled already owned several properties courtesy of his well-connected family, so it wasn’t as though they would be saving hard to put down the deposit on their first home. They were already enjoying a lifestyle that permitted spur-of-the-moment jaunts to Europe.
Having completed the legalities, the young couple confronted an enormous question: how to break the news to Khaled’s mother, Fatima, and the wider family. In the absence of a father, Fatima would be the most acutely affected of all those caught up in Katya and Khaled’s blossoming love story. It took Khaled several weeks to prepare himself for the big announcement but, in the event, Fatima was not terribly surprised. She had secretly suspected that marriage was on the cards. And it helped enormously that Fatima had known and loved Katya since schooldays.
Fatima told Khaled to leave it to her to manage the reactions of a family that had lived a noble tradition as desert people and now found their world invaded by a western interloper. She definitely had a tricky job.
Fatima’s extended family is plugged deep into the history of Al Ain. A famous character in Emirati lore, her father was known as ‘Emir’ (‘he who must be obeyed’) to Sheikh Zayed, an indicator of how much respect he commanded. Emir was still alive and had four wives plus a five-year-old daughter at the time.
Maybe the toughest nut to crack would be the old Mazrouei family matriarch, Mama Dana, then in her early eighties. Mama Dana was a true desert woman, so tiny that her feet did not touch the ground when seated. She dressed from head to toe in black, with a triangular piece of shiny gold material fashioned into a beak-like mask covering her forehead and nose. This was the traditional desert burqa, which had the very practical purpose of keeping the sand out of her face. By her appearance she was a formidable proposition, the very embodiment of an old, conservative culture.
At the same time, this family had already been subjected to the comprehensive change that progress had brought to all Emirati families. Khaled’s father had grown up in the oasis town of Liwa, deep in the western desert. Here, life had been as hard as it could be, with no electricity and few facilities to speak of to cope with the searing heat. As a younger man he drove buses and did odd jobs, in the days before oil was discovered. Khaled’s father was much older than Fatima when they married and unfortunately died while Khaled was in his early twenties.
One generation on, Khaled had received an education in English at an international school and completed a master’s degree in urban planning from the Sorbonne in Paris. He went on to get a scholarship to Harvard, studying at the John F Kennedy Centre for Governance. He is part of the generation that sees it as a duty to drive the UAE into the future with the skills of the twenty-first century.
Just imagine: forty years ago Khaled’s father was making ends meet in the desert, driving a bus. He wouldn’t even have known where the United States was, let alone Harvard. How does a society cope with a generational change like that? But they have.
The Mazroueis might have had every reason to put up the walls and keep Katya out. But they did the opposite. Whatever the official barriers, these have never got in the way of the Mazrouei family’s affection for Katya. They opened their arms to her immediately, and the way they have treated her and accepted us since then has been extraordinary.
Twenty-four
God’s will
One thing you learn as a vet is the need to show complete authority around an animal. You need to take charge. Some can do it naturally. For others it’s always a battle.
So it was with some pride that I looked on as my daughter Erica grabbed a nasty, snarling stray dog by the scruff of the neck and held it stock-still as I plunged a tranquillising injection into its hindquarters. She’d shouldered aside another vet who’d gone all wobbly and was threatening to lose control of the situation. Erica, by contrast, showed no fear.
This was the first time I’d done serious veterinary work with my daughter and I could see she had the Tinson genes.
Erica was in
her fourth year of studies at the University of Melbourne and was over in Al Ain on a two-week study trip a couple of years after I’d returned. I had started a program with the university, as well as with other universities in Australia, whereby students could travel to Al Ain and get the kind of practical experience that was not possible in Australia. Erica was the first.
There was plenty to be done. I was working with a local animal charity trying to do something about the hundreds of stray dogs and cats roaming the streets of Al Ain. The answer was simple: desex the animals or, in some cases, and regrettably, put them to sleep if they were too badly injured.
I established a mobile clinic to go around the streets and to homes. And this was where things had become tricky with the dog. If you are on a dog’s territory, it thinks it is in charge. That’s why it’s so much easier to perform these operations in a clinic, with a trained nurse around you to keep the animal under control.
It might sound mundane compared to tangling with chimpanzees and cheetahs, but the practical work of desexing and carrying out minor surgery on cats and dogs is important in developing a young vet’s skills. I’d had plenty of opportunity to do it, but in the thirty years since I’d done my studies, things had changed at university. Due to the objections of animal rights groups, it had become impossible to hone basic skills on live animals, even though they were destined for euthanasia at the RSPCA.
I could see that Erica had excellent technical knowledge. She just needed the practice. And here she and other young vets would be able to carry out dozens of surgeries in a week, as much as they might in a year in Australia. This was a great way for Erica to get a taste for perhaps becoming a desert vet, too.
Then out of the blue came a job that neither of us was prepared for.
There had been an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UAE and it had hit the native animals hard. The gazelles, in particular, were seriously at risk, and I needed to visit them urgently at Sheikh Sultan’s farm, about an hour and a half away from Al Ain, between Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
I headed out with Erica. As we drove through the security gates and along the roadway to the sheikh’s home, we got a sense of the scale of the problem. There weren’t just one or two gazelles here, as you might find in a zoo: the sheikh had two thousand of these creatures, roaming freely across a vast expanse of sandy flatlands.
Arabian gazelles are gorgeous animals. They hold a special place in the history of the area. Abu Dhabi, for example, literally means ‘father of the gazelle’. Sleek and slender, they hardly weigh anything, maybe only fifteen kilos or so. They have a beautiful two-toned coat, with fawn on their back, neck and head while their belly and behind are pure white. Their coat is short and glossy, to reflect the sun’s radiation. In other words, they are perfectly adapted to their environment. And that was the problem.
Having evolved in the isolation of the Arabian Gulf, Arabian gazelles simply aren’t built to cope with imported diseases. Foot and mouth is, of course, serious for cattle and sheep, though not necessarily deadly. They get a high fever for two or three days and will then get blisters in the mouth and on the feet. The danger is that these blisters rupture and make the animals lame. For gazelles, though, the foot and mouth virus can be devastating. It can inflame the heart tissue, leading to cardiac lesions, and they simply drop dead.
The foot and mouth virus had probably been blown in by the wind. It is incredibly infectious, so there was a need to move fast in case it devastated the entire herd.
Foot and mouth is unknown in Australia, so this was something new for Erica. I had some experience fixing minor ailments with gazelles, but nothing on this scale. There is a foot and mouth vaccine, but it’s useless once an outbreak is underway.
And anyway, how do you catch them? If a gazelle is well, you can’t get within a bull’s roar of it. A gazelle runs like the wind, with speeds of up to sixty-five kilometres an hour. And this presented the same challenges as I’d had with the sheikh’s oryx: if you chase a gazelle or an oryx for more than five minutes and put them under stress, their muscles break down and they die. They are not physiologically equipped for long chases, because that never happens in the wild.
Our first task was to isolate the affected animals, immobilise them and take their blood for testing. We put plastic around our boots and gloved up before moving from animal to animal. It was clear which ones were already sick. Part of the job was to confirm the diagnosis by taking blood or skin scrapings, for analysis later.
We did our best by isolating those we knew were infected but we lost a quarter of the gazelles over a two-week period during this outbreak. That’s the thing about being a wild animal vet: it’s exciting work, but can also be incredibly frustrating. You have to have different skills for different species. The episode with the gazelles reminded me of my trials and tribulations at the Lion Safari Park as a young vet. With wild animals, like a lion or a tiger, just catching them is hard enough. Handling them is also difficult. In fact, it’s all stressful; everything you do is a drama.
The sheikh appreciated that we had done all we could, but in the end he accepted it as God’s will that the animals should die. There wasn’t much we could do about it.
Because of the large-scale migration of wild animals from Africa, India and other parts, animals in the UAE are subject to all sorts of horrible diseases that you will virtually never find in Australia. Sometimes they’re not easy to spot, and they represent a serious occupational hazard for a vet.
The most dangerous camel disease for humans goes by the grand name Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever. As its name suggests, it is found mainly in two parts of the world, Eastern Europe and Africa. The disease is carried by ticks found on camels, though the animals themselves are completely unaffected. For humans it is a severe, deadly disease that is only one step down from ebola. Basically, your blood vessels break down, you bleed out and you turn into a big lump of jelly. In one two-year period, nineteen animal workers in the UAE died from this, though thankfully none at our camel camps.
During our early years in Al Ain there was a prohibition on putting any animal down, even if it was in terrible and incurable suffering, because of a strong religious belief that only God could decide if a living thing should die. The exception to this rule was where it involved rabies, a killer disease that does not exist in Australia. I discovered the risk early in the piece when I was called out to a camp to deal with a camel that was very clearly suffering the ‘furious’ form of rabies. This is the rabid-dog kind, where an animal is running around literally out of control and typically looking to bite another animal.
Any mammal can get rabies, but in the case of camels it is very difficult to deal with. Camels are big, strong beasts and pretty well impossible to control when they are running and kicking at will. I dealt with a few cases in the early days and it was scary. You had to get hold of them using ropes and a team of helpers and euthanase them without getting in contact with saliva, and without being bitten. Then you had to remove their brain and have it sent away to confirm that it was rabies.
There’s another form of rabies, though, that it is much harder to spot in a camel. Indeed, the animal looks anything but furious. I’ve dealt with a small number of these, where the animal had facial paralysis and was drooling, looking for all the world as though it had something stuck in its throat. This is ‘dumb’ or paralytic rabies. I learned quickly to take the precaution of always putting on surgical gloves whenever I was going to stick my hand in a camel’s mouth, just in case.
Dumb or furious, ninety-nine per cent of the time rabies will kill a human being if you don’t get treatment straightaway. The problem is it can take weeks before any clinical symptoms of rabies appear and then it is too late. You will die. So I make sure anyone working closely with our camels is vaccinated.
Erica’s experiences in the UAE exposed her to eventualities she might never encounter in Australia, yet they were invaluable for her knowledge. One lesson was the need to be cons
tantly vigilant.
After working together on surgeries and embryo transfers for a couple of weeks, Erica concluded that I was a bit old school and a lot stubborn. She was probably right on both counts.
Twenty-five
Blood ties
Four years after she married Khaled, Katya gave birth to a baby boy who they named Hazza, my first grandchild. Because of camels I was already on very good terms with two of Khaled’s uncles, both of them mad camel men. But the birth was the superglue that really brought our two families together, the Tinsons and the Mazroueis. It was a transformative event: that day all barriers disappeared and I became linked through blood to my adopted home.
Fatima had used all her influence to make sure Katya got the best possible care at the local hospital. She was unstoppable in getting what she wanted for her daughter-in-law.
After the birth I arrived to find that Fatima had set up camp and spread out her own bedding in Katya’s private room so she could sleep on the floor, a very traditional Bedouin custom. So from day one the relationship between Emirati grandmother, Australian mother and Emirati–Australian child was incredibly tight. How many mothers-in-law do you know who would camp out on a hospital floor?
When you bring together two very different cultures there’s always going to be some collisions, especially when it comes to how you raise a baby. Upon leaving the hospital Katya insisted there would need to be a proper baby capsule in the car. But Fatima wanted to hold Hazza in her arms while they drove away, which was the custom for Emiratis. As a good western mother, Katya had a strict daily routine for Hazza and wanted him in bed and asleep by seven o’clock. Emirati kids, on the other hand, are normally up and about with the family until all hours, basically until they drop.